Mac OS X

One of the things I appreciate about my Macs is their longevity. It's 2025, and, while showing signs of its age, my Macbook Pro 2012 is still useful. In fact, I only recently replaced it with a used 2018 Mac Mini, out of which I hope to get several more years while I figure out how to solve the problem with running Windows applications on ARM-based/M-Series/Apple Silicon machines.

I was recently re-purposing an old Macbook Pro (2012) which was originally purchased through a school district. I installed a new SSD and booted from an external boot disk, then downloaded and installed Mac OSX 10.14 Mojave on the new drive. After restarting, I went through the setup and a window popped-up stating that the machine could be remotely managed by the school district. I had completely forgotten where it came from (this is 2025), so this was a bit of a surprise.

$ soffice --headless --convert-to txt:Text TEXT_DOCUMENT.odt

$ sudo port install dd
$ diskutil list
$ sudo dd bs=4m if=/dev/diskX of=DiskImage.img

$ touch -t <YYYYDDDDHHMM>
$ touch -t 201106301416
$ touch -r <from_file> <to_file>

Many things irritate me, so take this post with a grain of salt, but I hate the fact every significant MacOS update breaks my development environment. The latest was a security update to Catalina, MacOS 10.15.7. I have learned to test things out (Apache/PHP/MySQL) immediately after these updates, and I discovered (again), that Apache was broken. Now, admittedly, this is because I am using a different version of Apache from the one distributed by Apple, and installed using MacPorts. So I guess this is just something I have to live with.

If you're an advanced Mac OS X user, you've undoubtedly come across the .AppleDouble directories and .DS_Store files at some point. Here's a bit of an explanation of their purpose, along with how to delete them and ensure they never return.

I've been a licensed amateur radio operator since 2015, and Mac user since 1997. The combination of these two meant that when I was looking for a logging application for my ham radio contacts, my options were limited, which is fine since MacLoggerDX is such a great application.

I recently found myself remotely installing/upgrading MySQL on a remote MacOS machine without GUI access. It's an old but solid PowerMac G5 running 10.5 Leopard. I couldn't remember how to do this, but a quick search provided the following solution.

The first step was mounting the disk image (dmg):

$ sudo hdiutil attach

The volume will be mounted at /Volumes/<dmg>

Next, install the pkg file:

$ sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/<dmg>/<pkg> -target /

Lastly, cleanup:

As a Linux user, I've come to rely on package managers for installing various command-line (and other) programs. Under MacOSX, there are a few third-party options that I am aware of: Fink, Homebrew, and MacPorts. Each one has it's benefits, and I've used all three at various times. I found a decent comparison on stackexchange.